


of the end of the world

by augurspex



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Eventual Fluff, Gen, Hurt TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Hurt/Comfort, IRL Fic, Major Character Injury, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:54:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29567817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/augurspex/pseuds/augurspex
Summary: He frantically wipes off every inch of gore on him, scrubbing his skin raw as his shoulders shake around him. Pulpy flesh smears away onto the material, and it feels the same as his old school blazer did but the more he thinks aboutthatthe harder it is to breathe so Tommy stops, focuses back on just trying to get the blood off, gasping breaths bubbling up from the lump in his throat.(Or; the apocalypse doesn’t do wonders for Tommy’s streaming career.)
Relationships: TommyInnit & Phil Watson, TommyInnit & Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson, TommyInnit & Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson & Toby Smith | Tubbo, Tommyinnit & Toby Smith | Tubbo, Tommyinnit & Wilbur Soot
Comments: 67
Kudos: 203





	1. the world just screams and falls apart

**Author's Note:**

> A heads up that although I'll be providing more specific content warnings in the notes before every chapter, there are certain things I've chosen not to tag that may be triggering to readers, though it all falls under 'Blood & Gore'. I've done this out of a wish to avoid spoilers.
> 
> Please be careful, be aware of the inherently violent nature of this kind of genre, and proceed at your own discretion. I can guarantee there will be no major character death. Thank you!
> 
> Disclaimer that if any CC are uncomfortable with this kind of fic, I will take it down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Warnings:**  
>  \- blood and gore  
> \- description of a dead body  
> \- derealisation  
> \- food mention  
> \- panic attacks  
> \- references to throwing up

Tommy hasn’t left the garage in days.

Not by choice, not really. He doesn’t _want_ to be here — it’s _cold_. The air is stale. Everything is blanketed in a fine layer of dust, and there’s damp crawling up the walls. When he looks up from his knees it feels like the walls are closing in on him.

It was never his first choice of bunker, but his heart had been beating out of his chest, blood pounding like a drum, a swollen tide of fear biting at his heel and spurring him in here before he could even try and summon a clear thought. He hadn’t been thinking. He’d nearly tripped down the narrow steps in his panic, and he had choked trying to lock himself in, fingers fumbling with the bolt for a terrifying, delayed second.

When he’d finally managed to slide the latch across he’d immediately stumbled back and away from the door — the world pitching under his feet, walls twisting inwards. He pushed himself into the farthest corner amongst the shelves and the boxes until his back hit the wall. And then he’d slid down, and waited, arms wrapped around his knees, for it to all be over.

It might just be the end of the world.

He’s not sure exactly how long he’s been in here for — it’s been a while since he heard anything from outside, and it’s been quiet. He hasn’t heard anything since he last woke up, anyways. He almost misses the noise. At least screaming meant the world was still alive. 

In the first hours, the garage door had done nothing to muffle the complete pandemonium unravelling just outside; the riotous uproar, the tempest of frenzied shrieks and shouts, the shrill, scraping screeches of cars hauling out of their driveways. The far away rumbles and distant sirens far outside of his neighbourhood. 

The running, the falling, soles on pavement and flesh on concrete. 

The smashing of glass and plastic and wood.

Clinking, rattling metal.

A sob. A cut-off yelp.

Someone beating on the door.

(Tommy blinks, and tries not to remember.)

Before, he’d brought his legs into his chest and screwed his eyes shut against the havoc, anchoring his fingers into the flesh of his calves. He did his best to block it all out — curled around the restless, shivering ball of alarm that had burrowed its way into his chest — as the world tore itself apart around him. It hadn’t worked very well.

As the hours stretched on the cacophony had shrivelled into long bouts of silence, these deceptive slivers of tranquillity that were unsettling if only because they were backed by the faint, lingering musk of decay. He kept very, very still, and very quiet, listening for the hint of someone safe outside; his parents, the police, paramedics, _anyone,_ letting himself be coaxed into feeling safe before a distant commotion or voiceless bump against the door sent him spiralling back into a state of utter, paralysing paranoia. 

Now, days later, stillness has settled over his street like a low-lying fog. Like a beating heart ripped raw from someone’s chest — one second frantically pounding, the next still and limp. Tommy waits and listens to his own quiet breathing now, the staggered tap of his fingers on the lid of the paint tin, the brush of his jeans against the concrete. 

When he stops breathing, he swears he can almost hear his heart beating. The blood flowing through his veins, his eyelashes flutter against his skin. The grinding of his joints as he shifts his legs.

The world’s fallen discomfitingly silent for seven point eight billion people.

In the blur of darkness, Tommy traces the outlines of things he can barely make out. Six hours into his self-imposed confinement, the bulb hanging down from the centre of the room flickered. Two hours after that, the room was dunked into pitch dark for a full minute, before the bulb hummed and lit up once more. The next morning, it died for good.

Time has distorted around him, distended and contracted, and he can never quite tell what time of day it is. He’s slept twice since coming in here, and he never knows if it’s morning when he wakes up, or if it was night when he fell asleep. Sleep. Sleep is strange. He’s so, so tired, but he can never quite drift. His heart beats too loudly for that.

Instead, he simply finds himself waking up from a slumber he doesn’t remember, piece by piece: legs numb and dead and uncomfortable, eyes always gazing vaguely at shapes he can’t quite put together, mouth gross and dry. There’s an ache in his body that never quite leaves, a fatigue he can’t shake off.

His phone is the only other source of light, and the only thing that ties him back to reality. He gives in to the urge to turn it on and use a little battery whenever it gets too much. Just to check the time. Just so he knows whether it’s morning or afternoon or evening or night.

It doesn’t make a difference, in the end, what time of the day or night it is. It’s always dark, and it’s always quiet.

Tommy’s phone, besides, is a precious resource — or rather the charge on it is. He’d used up most of it in the first couple hours, scrolling through Twitter religiously when his hands had finally stopped shaking enough to navigate it, searching for something more than panicked tweets and shaky clips stamped with content warnings for violence and gore. He needed help, direction, an _answer —_ but the app had crashed within the first hour, and it hadn’t come back since. 

His next plan of action had been, as it was in any disaster, to call Phil. When Phil hadn’t picked up, he called who he called whenever he was in trouble: Wilbur. And then Wilbur didn’t answer either. And then neither did Tubbo, and Tommy knew that something was really, seriously wrong. 

With his heart in his throat he’d called _everyone_ on his friends list and some more, shooting them all frantic texts in the desperate hope that _someone_ would give him something in return, some small reassurance that he wasn’t totally alone in this, a glint of consolation that they were _okay._

No one ever returned his calls.

When Tommy checks his DMs, the messages are still there, highlighted in error red. No matter how many times he holds to resend them, there’s always a network error. There’s been a network error for two days now. He turns his phone back off, ignoring the part of him that so wildly wants to cling onto it, and slips back into the cold reality of the garage.

He shivers. He’s crumpled on a concrete floor, the radiator may as well be made of ice, and it’s not like he had half the mind to grab a jacket when he thought there was a real chance he might die. Maybe he could’ve done something with the car, if it was here, but his dad left with it the morning before — before everything. 

So Tommy curls into himself as tightly as he can, hands tucked between his legs, toes curled, and tries to ignore the cold slinking across his skin. 

Weak memories of riots and sickness on the News subsection of his Youtube recommended mock him. It’d been so small, so nothing, so the same as everything else that had trended this last year. Is it his fault he hadn’t paid it any mind? 

And what is he supposed to do now? He doesn’t know where his parents are. The smart option is to stay where he’s safe and hidden until he’s sure he can leave, because no police or paramedics or fire service have come to fix anything on his street just yet but they _have_ to, eventually. Right? It’s their jobs. And — and someone has to check the garage at some point, and they’ll find him then. And they’ll know what to do. They’ve got to.

Tommy stretches his leg out across the space in front of him, and then tucks it back against his chest. He’s cramped, and cold, and exhausted. He feels gross. He hates staying inside, he hates even being at home all day without going out and now he’s been stuck in the same shitty, dark room for two or three or however many days straight and he just — it just _sucks._ A lot. It sucks.

He’s thirsty. The single bottle of water in the cooler didn’t really last long. 

And he’s _hungry._ He’s so, so hungry.

The side door — the one that leads into his kitchen, the rest of his home — leans into the edges of Tommy’s peripheral like a promise, like a beckoning to come try the handle. The distance between him and the stone steps leading up to it sways, the peeling red paint straining his eyes, the smudged brass handle dilating before him. 

The fear makes his stomach turn. He’s hungry, and it’s so quiet. It’s so, so quiet. It’s been days. He’s scared. But he’s been scared since the start of this mess, so if he’s waiting to not be scared to go eat some food, then he’s gonna fucking starve in this bunker.

Fifty-something hours since he first came in here, Tommy makes a bid to leave.

Fear still buzzes under his diaphragm as he goes for the side-door, whirring like an unseen mechanism at the base of his chest and leading his lungs to a shudder as he breathes — so he turns around and scours the shelves, rummaging through the boxes until he finds his dad’s toolbox and pulls out the claw hammer. Tommy weighs it in his hand, has a swing at empty air, and decides it's good enough.

He pauses at the top of the steps, before the door. The steps could fall out from under him. The peeling paint mocks him. The handle is cold under his hand. Tommy draws a quick breath, and opens it.

His house is empty.

What Tommy can see of the ground floor is, at least. His first step into the kitchen is a slow, careful one, eyes scanning the room and the rooms beyond it with all the focus he can put into it. There’s light behind the window, so at least it’s not the middle of the night. There’s no danger he can find either, no sign of movement whatsoever, so after a long second of lingering in the limbo between the two rooms, Tommy lets the door close behind him. The click of its mechanism startles him.

After that, he takes quickly to his kitchen. It’s familiar, a comfort, and when he’s rooting through his fridge for anything to eat, Tommy can almost forget the nightmare of the last few days. He inhales a whole pack of custard creams from the biscuit tin, and it feels like he’s about to stream in two minutes and he’s finding a last-minute snack. Like nothing’s wrong, nothing’s changed. 

There doesn’t actually end up being that much of interest in the fridge: butter, milk, an assortment of jams, a bunch of vegetables in the bottom shelf, a few bags of peas and various freeze-dried fruit in the freezer… nothing he particularly fancies. He’s still hungry as hell though, so he pulls out a tupperware box of leftovers — carbonara, fuck yeah — from the back and sets it on the counter, peeling the lid off and dumping the whole thing in a pan. He turns the gas on and sticks it on the fire.

Whilst he’s waiting for his pasta to heat up, Tommy sits back on the counter. The light from the window isn’t warm, nor particularly bright, but it’s the first natural light he’s seen in… quite a bit. Beneath the hiss of the gas, the house is quiet. It gives him space to think.

He’s safe for now, but the reassurance doesn’t placate the anxiety thrumming under his skin. He doesn’t know how long it’s going to take for emergency services to get here, and he doesn’t know when his parents are coming home. He hasn’t heard any sirens since the first day. Outside holds as much familiarity as a stranger, an uncertainty and a threat with a pulse Tommy can feel palpitating through his front door.

The anxiety squeezes into a fist, and then out again. He can’t leave the house.

There are worse things than being trapped at home — god knows, it’s all anyone’s been doing for the past year. What Tommy needs to do is make sure he’s prepared to hole out here until he can go outside again, and if all he has is whatever’s in the house, then supplies are limited. 

There’s also the possibility to consider that when rescue services come in, they’ll relocate him somewhere else whilst they fix everything. There could well be an emergency evacuation — there might have already _been_ one, and Tommy might have just missed it because he was holed up in his garage like a little rat — _like a raccoon,_ he thinks, with a note of amusement. Tommy pushes his pasta around with a spatula, sets the implement on the counter, and dashes upstairs. If that’s the case, then he needs to be prepared to leave when they do come to his door.

He needs to grab a bag, he decides on the landing, and he needs to pack anything he might need if he’s going to be away from home for a while. He lists them off in his head as he hurries into his room, grabbing his Zelda bag from its hook. _Phone charger, adaptor, earbuds;_ he sweeps them off his desk and into the front pocket. He needs cash, too — his wallet. Tommy plucks it from his nightstand. 

He scouts through the rest of his drawers, quickly looking for anything else he might want to grab. Schoolwork, _nope,_ headphones, _maybe?_ Probably not, he has his earbuds, and it’s not like he's going to be streaming… Tommy trashes the idea of trying to take his streaming set-up as soon as it rears its head. Somehow, he doubts it’ll fit in his backpack. He shuts the last drawer and moves to his shelf.

He hovers over all the clutter; books he’s been given for Christmases over the last seventeen years and never opened, the yoyo from the arcade, some highlighters, a dented cardboard Minecraft sword, a matching helmet, a pack of Uno cards, deodorant, a line of Youtooz figures, including his own… there’s nothing really _necessary_ there, and he needs all the space he can get. As much as he doesn’t want to leave any of this behind, Tommy settles for chucking the deodorant into his bag and leaving the rest. 

Spare clothes are something he should bring too, just in case — so he grabs the couple of shirts piled over the back of his desk chair, loosely folding and stuffing them down into the bottom of his bag, plus some jeans and socks and such from his closet drawers alongside. 

The sound of spitting grease interrupts him as he’s sticking the last balled up pair of socks in beside his already tangled earbuds, and with a start Tommy remembers his pasta. He quickly picks his bag up, conducting a last minute sweep of his room as he backs up towards the hallway. The pop and crackle from downstairs only becomes more urgent the longer he lingers, and nothing stands out anyways, so he runs for the stairs to save his carbonara.

As soon as he reaches the landing, Tommy darts over to the stove and turns the heat down, watching the flames subdue down to a minute flicker. After setting his bag on the counter, he begins rooting through the cupboards — because _snacks,_ he should bring snacks with him too, just in case. He stuffs the best shit he can find in with his other belongings: a pack of chocolate digestives, some cereal bars with too much sugar to really be considered healthy, and then for a final touch because he can already hear Phil criticising him, a banana from the fruit bowl —

A thump on the glass. Tommy freezes.

His breath holds itself in his throat, muscles stiffened, air static, as he turns — slowly, millimetre by millimetre — towards the window. There’s a dead woman pressed up against the pane.

He screams.

The sound wrenches itself from his throat as he stumbles backwards into the dining table, grappling the edge of the chair to steady himself as the — the — the _corpse_ beats against the glass. 

Her face — what used to be her face, that is — is sunken, waxy pale and marbling dark swollen veins, bruise-coloured blotches, eyes set in dark hollows and ringed in swollen pink. She lurches and Tommy jerks back, captivated in a paralysing horror as she snarls, teeth bared, her gums exposed and eroded and _peeling._

Her head is caved in. The chair shakes with Tommy’s hand.

Beneath her stringy hair, the side of her skull has been — bashed, the bone collapsed and fractured and missing, and under it is a thick stew of greys and reds and pink, fluids and tissue and _rotting flesh_ but _she’s still moving —_

Tommy gags, snaps his head away — _what the fuck._ What the _fuck!?_

There’s another, violent thud, and despite himself Tommy looks back up; the woman — corpse — dead person — _thing_ is still very much there, and he can do nothing but gape in terror as the glass cracks under her assault. She's restless in her attack on the window, an unnerving frenzy in her as she desperately and furiously batters against it. Her eyes are completely milky blank, lens clouded, and yet somehow it still feels like her hysteric glare is directed straight at _him._

The crunching sound of the glass fracturing again under her bruised and bloodied hands is what snaps Tommy out of his stupor. He staggers back, fumbling for wherever the hell he put his hammer down, the reality that he is _danger_ rushing back to him in dizzying, nauseating alarm. 

He finds the hammer, and clutches onto it for dear life. Another crack splinters across the window. Tommy takes a shaky step back, weapon raised. 

The woman snarls, spittle flying, and her hand smashes straight through the pane. Glass shatters around her, shards skidding across the tiles, blood splattering across the counter — 

Tommy grabs his bag and runs.

* * *

His first step into the outside is overwhelmed with the miasma of rotting meat.

It’s indescribably awful; like an entire slaughterhouse has been left fermenting in direct sunlight for a straight decade, a stench so sudden and terrible it sends Tommy reeling as soon as he flings the back door open. He stumbles down the steps to a stuttered halt at the bottom, lurching, his hands automatically flying up to stifle his nose and mouth. 

The smell permeates. He chokes.

Something groans in the house behind him, and Tommy sprints — through the back garden, hands still clasped over his face, fear driving him through the flower beds and weeds till he reaches the fence panel. Ignoring the thorns and twigs catching on his trouser legs, he clambers over it, using the spaces between the slats as footholds to push himself up and over into the next street. He ends up toppling into the pavement with at least a dozen new splinters.

Tommy gets up, nursing his scraped hands — and yelps and falls back. _That’s a dead body._

There’s a dead body in the middle of the street, misshapen and motionless and all the wrong colours, face grimly pallid and festering and Tommy stares and begins to realise there’s nothing below the nose before he snaps away, hands shaking over his mouth. That person doesn’t have a jaw.

He squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to look at that. _He doesn’t want to look at that._

Horror burgeons as he hastens away, down the street past all the other identical houses, terror pushing against the limits of his mind. Through the resurging wave of nausea, he tries to think. It all feels hazy, staticky, like a blur through frosted glass, and he can’t put anything in focus, his fingers winding tighter around the hammer, using its weight as an anchor to redirect his mind to, to ignore the way his hands shudder, breath slipping through the seam of his mouth, his chest stuttering in pathetic jerking attempts for air —

He jumps — suddenly there’s a man there, whose cheek peels like a strip of lasagne down from his skull — and Tommy doesn’t mean to freeze when the man turns towards him, movement snapping from dazed and directionless to stiff, jagged lurches, but he does. All he can think of is the stink of vomit and fever and death and — the guy’s legs snap and bend under him like rubber, and he lunges. 

Tommy skitters backwards, nearly tripping over the edge of the pavement before he twists and breaks into a sprint. He doesn’t even know where he’s headed. His brain is so swollen with adrenaline and fear and horror and the _smell —_

He’s jerked back, faced with the cheekless man with his wrist caught in a dead-fingered grip. The guy yanks forwards, spitting blood and bile with gnashing teeth, and Tommy frantically pulls back away from his snapping jaw. He’s yelling and stumbling backwards and trying to wrench his wrist out, but the hold is stiff and vice-like and he can’t get out, and in the throes of frenzied panic he lashes out and finds himself with the claws of the hammer caught inside the man’s cheek.

The guy bites forwards and Tommy thrusts the hammer away from himself, dragging the guy back along with it and leaving his teeth to bite down on air bare millimetres from Tommy’s face. He runs on the adrenaline of another spike of fear to shake the hammer in rapid, jerky movements, but it stays stubbornly lodged in the flesh of the dude’s face.

So instead, trying his best not to be knocked over by the man’s furious jolts towards him, Tommy uses the hammer to keep the man’s face at bay and shoves him into a lamp post. The guy smacks his head off it. It’s with significant enough recoil that the hammer finally pulls free, and Tommy just as soon smashes it down on the man’s wrist. The flesh gives and he rips himself out of the guy’s grip, spins around, and sprints once again down the street as fast as he can. 

He doesn’t dare check behind him. 

He doesn’t know where he’s going but he keeps running, keeps running _running_ **_running_ **even when it feels like steel wool is being stuffed down his throat and his lungs are screaming and ready to burst out of his ribs. Keeps running because if he doesn’t he thinks the raw terror might just swallow him whole. 

He’s just veered into a narrow side street when the wave of panic he’d been riding out begins to crash back down — and when the terror finally burns through his body, Tommy is too exhausted to process collapsing onto the ground and gagging his heart out. 

The next minute passes in a garbled blur of fear and shock and horror.

Eventually, Tommy manages to summon enough muscle to painstakingly push himself up onto his elbows. His vision is a haze, narrowed in on the ground underneath in a strange distorted myopia that makes him dizzy enough that his strength fails and drops him right back on the pavement. He pinches his eyes shut, and stubbornly tries again.

His arms quake beneath him. His legs feel like jelly. After a few, long shaky seconds, he finally manages to get back up. He chokes wetly on something, breathing replaced by stuttering gasps. He’s hand and knees on concrete, hyperventilating, and unable to throw up because there’s still fuck all in his stomach. 

Tommy swallows down the part of him that wants to cry.

It takes another minute of trying to breathe (in for four, hold for seven, out for eight) for him to properly gather his bearings. His mind clears just enough that he can crawl over to the wall, turn himself around and slump against it. He shuts his eyes and leans back, letting his head swim. He’s tired. It’s hard to think.

This is — bad. _Bad_ bad.

Emergency services might take a little longer than he thought.

Holing up in his house isn’t an option any more — not with the rabid dead hunting him down, not with the pitiful excuse for supplies he has. He needs more than the snacks in his bag and needs to stock up on more food, because currently he somehow doesn’t think the banana, some cereal bars, chocolate digestives and the custard cream crumbs are gonna cut it.

He needs more stuff in general, really. Most urgently a mask — or a scarf, or a balaclava or something _,_ because the rancid stench of rot is physically fucking _unbearable_ . He’d been hoping that now he’s away from it all, the smell would subside — but it doesn’t. It _sticks_ , burned deep in his sinuses, scratched at the back of his throat: a putrid, necrotic clot of fermenting meat. 

Tommy weakly gags again. He can’t live with this. He has to get away.

And he has to get more food so he doesn’t starve before being mauled to death by a fucking zombie.

Tommy doesn’t play at any false pretences; he knows that’s what they are. And — okay, it’s stupid, and impossible, and… downright terrifying, but apparently TV and video games weren’t a complete lie, and _damn_ him if Tommy’s gonna go through that whole bullshit of calling them walkers or biters or lurkers or whatever.

They’re _zombies_. And they’re real, apparently.

Jesus Christ. He really has the worst luck.

* * *

When he feels recovered enough, Tommy makes the executive decision to stock up at the corner store.

It’s a small, narrow building with a total of three aisles, a ten minute walk from his house, though it takes triple the time with the life-threatening peril he has to navigate through. Luckily, he doesn’t encounter too much of that on the way — namely speed walking away from a lonely zombie that shuffles out of nowhere but luckily doesn’t seem to spot him, and making a few adjustments to his route when they take him down a street with one too many dead people in it.

The bell above the store door rings shrilly when he swings it open. He cringes, shooting a nervous look back at the street he just left — he doesn’t spot any immediate threats, thank god. There’s never been a good bell in a zombie apocalypse. 

(His heart twists at that. Is that what this is? An _apocalypse?)_

Usually, the corner store is made up of stacked shelves with all the basic grocery items, plus rows of magazines, and the counter equipped with its own mini-shelves of gum and mints and cough sweets. There’s also a refrigerator next to the front door for cool drinks and sandwiches.

Now, the store is a right eyesore — shelves near empty and in total disarray, boxes knocked to the floor, and a lot of meal deals worth of products scattered all over. He picks up what he can salvage, though there’s not a lot left that he actually likes. For the most part it’s looking pretty ransacked. 

(There’s a long, thick smear of something crimson and pungent around the front of the counter. Tommy chooses not to look too long at it.)

Things lighten up considerably when he reaches the sugar isle; a lot of the higher calorie things have been taken — most of the chocolate, a lot of the crisps — but there’s still enough left for Tommy’s bag to start having some serious weight. And as it turns out, no one found value in the _pure_ sugar, so Tommy packs his bag to the brim with rainbow belts and drumsticks and sour pops and Dip Dabs, grabbing a handful of gum from the shelf by the counter for good measure.

He ends his haul by nicking some masks from the box on the counter, and makes sure to leave a twenty to cover the cost of all the garbage he just took. He doesn’t bother with taking change from the register. They can keep it. 

After that, he retreats to the aisle with the cleanest floor, sits down, and cracks open a Coke — it really doesn’t taste that great, not after lying on the floor unrefrigerated for the past two or so days. He takes a sip and thinks. He’s not quite sure what to do now. He doesn’t really have anywhere to go — obviously he needs a safe place to stay and hide out until all of this gets sorted out, but it’s a question of where that’s supposed to be.

The garage had been safe: it’d kept everything out for as long as Tommy had been in there, but it had also been claustrophobic, and dark, and cold, and… awful all round. Besides, returning to the garage would also mean returning to his house, and though his heart pains at the thought of leaving his home behind… well, there’s zombies there.

The dead woman is probably still in his kitchen. The surrounding streets had had _corpses_ just _decaying_ on the road, and chasing after him, and — he’d really been convinced he was going to _die._ How can he be expected to live like that?

Tommy doesn’t want to go back.

The place for him to go has to be somewhere clear, somewhere with _no_ dead people, _no_ zombies. Somewhere safe. He hasn’t encountered any other alive people, but they must have gone _somewhere,_ right? They can’t all be gone.

The more he thinks about it the more he thinks that there must have been some sort of emergency evacuation of the city, something he missed whilst he was in hiding. 

The emergence of a zombie virus seems like something that would be a pretty high priority crisis. They — they being the government, the big G — have to have some kind of protocol in place, some sort of emergency procedures being enacted to solve this. Maybe there’s been another quarantine, and there’s someplace in the city that’s been roped off and kept safe, an assembly point for survivors to take refuge until BoJo gets his ass in gear and actually organises some kind of military intervention or whatever the shit it is that governments do when their citizens turn into undead rabid flesh-eating monsters.

A meeting point. A safe place. 

If Tommy were to guess one place in the city where he thinks that would be, he’d say the central city police station.

* * *

Getting to the city centre is harder than Tommy anticipated.

The further he moves into the commercial district and the closer he gets to the central city square, the denser the streets get with dead people — both zombies and regular corpses. It takes him a whole half hour just to make it out of his neighbourhood, mapping out the best route to avoid any run-ins and hiding behind cars for minutes on end whilst he’s waiting for a zombie to shamble past. 

They’re pretty slow when they’re not hunting him down, but that only lasts until he’s noticed — Tommy has one fucker sniff him out and the noise that comes from him trying to get away attracts the attention of several others on the street, and then he’s being chased down until he dips into a skip and slams the lid shut. Where he has to wait for a full twenty minutes before they forget about him and wander off. It’s not great.

And the smell, of course, continues to be utterly debilitating — as it turns out, the face mask does very little to guard against the smell. It pervades everything, even when he layers several masks. Tommy had thought that maybe he’d be used to it now, tougher, but it’s still just as distinct and overpowering, nausea flooding him in wave upon fetid wave. It means he has to take a lot more rest stops than he’d planned for, just to recover his watering senses. 

It only gets worse the closer he gets to the central plaza. By the time he’s reached the main road, he has to keep his hands clamped over his nose if he doesn’t want to be rendered immobile by his gag reflex kicking in, and the disorientating ache of sickness rising in his chest.

He wonders what kind of prevention measures they’ll put in place for that. Specialized masks, maybe, something with a built in oxygen filter? There’s no way they expect ordinary civilians to just put up with it.

As the sun makes its arc across the sky and Tommy progresses further into the heart of the city, the roads get wider and the buildings taller and the mounting apprehension worse. The congestion of death in the streets is getting worse and worse, to the point that Tommy has to fully deviate and take back alleys to avoid contact. It’s getting harder to even do that, though, and it all comes to a head when he’s facing down the high street.

The high street is the focal point of retailers, the facade of every several story high building plastered with an obnoxiously-coloured storefront. It has wide pavements and an even wider paved road, lined with adolescent trees, and bicycle racks, and lanky street lamps that get decorative lights picturing snowmen riding sleighs hung between them during the holiday season.

The main thing about high streets is that they’re always the busiest part of town. They’re the beating consumerist heart of any city, with any possible thing you could want to buy sure to be found along that long stretch of road — unless you live in a place that opposite-magnets businesses or you have incredibly niche wants.

But a large majority of the time, they’re full of people. Especially when quarantine restrictions are being relaxed. Especially when people are allowed to go out after being borderline shut in for a year.

All Tommy can do is stare. It’s still the busiest part of the city yet.

Because all he can see are teeth stained red, mouths brimming in dripping gore, globs of blood smeared across suits and shirts and jackets — torn apart, shredded, half-shed flesh and hanging skin. Disconnected and dislocated limbs, a grisly carnage, alive and swarming, like flies over a cadaver. And all blank eyes.

It’s just corpses. It’s just hundreds upon hundreds of _dead people,_ and not just the moving kind either. The truly dead are strewn across the streets like the eviscerated remains of some colossal beast, gutters running dark with what can be nothing but blood.

The stench, needless to say, is both psychologically and physically unbearable. Any thought of looking for a safe place in the city evaporates from Tommy’s mind. 

He doesn’t — he doesn’t think there’s anyone alive here. He doesn’t think there’s anyone alive at all. He has to get out of here — he has to _leave,_ now, _out out out,_ away, far away, far away from _all of this,_ because he can’t _be_ here, he can’t —

His panic is interrupted by a zombie he’d failed to notice suddenly lurching into his peripheral, eye popped like a runny egg, raw and dribbling. It grabs at him and he lets slip a loud yelp, and it all kind of goes downhill from there.

Before he knows it he’s backing up into a car, an adequately sized mob of zombies forming, alerted by the scuffle, congregating with their feral glares unmistakably on _him._ He tries to slip away before he gets trapped between the swarm and the car, ducking to dodge under the flailing attack of the first zombie, but he’s underestimated how many there were and now there’s one coming from here, there, and now he can’t go that way but when he turns around there’s more behind him, so he can’t go _that_ way either. 

How did this all go so wrong so quickly?

He ducks and darts through a gap in the gathering crowd, fiercely yanking out of the split-second grab of a zombie at his shirt and then knocking himself off-balance and falling back onto hard cement. It hurts, but he’s already scrabbling away as best he can, heels pushing at the grooves in the stone as he tries to pull himself up on his feet. By the time he’s up the zombie at the very front is a foot away from him, so close, too close, and there’s no opening, and it’s just getting worse the longer he panics because he doesn’t know what to _do_ and he doesn’t want to die and _he doesn’t want to die_ **_he doesn’t want to die —_ **

In some epiphanic moment of clarity, Tommy remembers he has a hammer in his hand.

He knows zombie movies. He knows to go for the head, _the brain._ He knows… he knows. 

But his arm feels too heavy, all of a sudden. Amidst it all, he finds himself caught in those blank eyes, putrescence stalking beyond the glaze of something once aware. It’s going to kill him. He’s going to die. He doesn’t want to die.

He screws his eyes as tightly shut as humanly possible. He tries not to think. And he brings his hammer down.

Something with the consistency of scrambled eggs splatters over his face, yolk dribbling down his chin. He clamps his mouth shut. Coke and custard creams edge their way back up his throat.

And it feels like a still of something terrible and unreal. A keyframe, paused to capture every detail of this moment, frozen to save to memory. To be poured over and examined in every waking moment. To be disfigured and picked apart and put back wrong in every sleeping one.

But time is still moving and there’s still noise and Tommy blinks his eyes open to the man still moving, still going, still alive — with a choked cry he brings the hammer down again, and again, and _again,_ bashing the steel face further into the guy’s skull with every impact, collapsing the tissue of his head until fluid begins to drain out of his nose, his mouth, his eyes, and with a final, shaky swing, Tommy smashes the man’s brain into the wall. It’s grey.

The zombie collapses into a heap. Tommy nearly does too, legs buckling, horror a visceral, swollen thing in his throat. 

The world is all too sharp and in focus, the faces of every corpse defined and real, but his own thoughts have turned into static. Blank. Like an overloaded computer. Like frosted glass.

He barely remembers escaping, some blur of adrenaline, like a shitty powerpoint transition, wiping the ducking and weaving, the rinse and repeat and copy and paste of being grabbed and getting out and veering into smaller streets, until he’s scrambling into a Specsavers, his sides cramping, his breathing thin. 

The glass doors close behind him, and he dashes to the back of the store and into the exam room, and slams that door shut too.

Shock wears thin. He’s in a small, dark, quiet room. 

Tommy crumbles to the floor and cries.

* * *

There’s a coat wrapped around the back of the desk chair, a woman’s overcoat with big buttons and a belt to cinch it around the waist.

He uses it to frantically wipe off every inch of gore on him, scrubbing his skin raw as his shoulders shake around him. Pulpy flesh smears away onto the material, and it feels the same as his old school blazer did but the more he thinks about _that_ the harder it is to breathe so Tommy stops, focuses back on just trying to get the blood off, gasping breaths bubbling up from the lump in his throat.

Minutes pass before he lets the stained fabric slip from his fingers — it was too dark to tell what colour it was before, but it’s definitely not that colour anymore. He slumps back, his legs splayed out across the floor, head propped against the door. His eyes burn. Something awful washes over him. He’s too tired to tell what feeling it is.

There’s a lot of those. Feelings. Clashing and yelling and overwhelming, to the point that they’ve all just cancelled each other out and stranded him in a subdued emotional exhaustion. 

If anything, Tommy feels… aware. Of the dimness of this room, of the eye chart hung on the wall, of the chair and the cameras and the lamps and all the other optometrist’s equipment. Of how dark it is, of how cold it is, of the tremors in his hands. Of the door behind him, the space in the room over, of the death that is waiting for him just behind these few walls.

He breathes in deeply through his nose, and back out his mouth. As he leans back, he’s also made aware of another thing: the shape of his phone in his pocket. He slips it out. It shakes in his hands, his fingers trembling with the burnt-out remains of adrenaline.

For the first time in a very long time, Tommy has no new notifications. He misses the application buttons a few times before he manages to jab his finger into the Twitter icon. He refreshes it several times. The servers are still down. 

He closes the tab and opens Discord. His messages still haven’t gone through. He tries calling Wilbur. The dialling tone rings for a long time before he ends the call himself. He tries calling Phil. He lets his phone go as he stares, through his fingers, at the light it casts on the opposite wall. He tries calling Tubbo. His head falls into his hands, and he sinks further down the wall.

He tries calling Techno, and Quackity and Jack and Fundy and Niki and Ranboo and Vikkstar and every other single person he knows. Not one of them picks up. 

Tommy takes a wobbly gulp of air, rubbing the wetness off his face. 

Things aren’t going back to normal, are they?

Admitting that feels like another blow to the chest, and Tommy nearly buckles over it — because everyone is dead. _Everyone is dead._ And now he’s stuck in a Specsavers surrounded by walking corpses. And he’s going to die.

What the hell is he supposed to do?

He looks back to his phone, the little charge it has left ticking down, finite. He picks it back up, pretends he’s curled up in bed and killing time until he’s tired enough to sleep, absent-mindedly scrolling through his DMs, texts and images flying under his fingers faster than he can read. It comes to a stop on a message from Tubbo, a week or so ago: 

_were palying jack box w/ quakcity nad we need more peolpe do yuo want to join???_

It’s such a stupid, mundane message. He stares at it a second, before his screen turns black and the low-battery symbol flashes red. He’s treated with a glint of his own despairing reflection before he pockets his dead phone.

He sniffs, wipes away the sticky fluid from his nose and the tear marks from his cheeks, and thinks.

There's not a lot he can do. There's been no solution or answer provided for him, and the way things are going, he doesn't think there's going to be. He doesn’t have a lot of options, but all he _can_ do is try and survive until he finds his friends. It's that or die, and he desperately doesn't want to die. Which just leaves him with trying and surviving.

He needs to get out of the city. He needs to move. He needs to make sure he doesn’t run out of food or water, and most importantly, he needs to find somewhere safe. And then he'll find them, and everything will be better.

The next morning, he wakes up bleary, residual headache eating away at his brain. He sighs past it and eats, and when he picks a direction to go in, Tommy chooses south. It feels obvious, instinctual, and right; his first choice, the rational decision. 

(He’s not clingy, he’s not — but at the end of the world, is it so out there to look for your best friend?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Holland, 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel.


	2. the death of all things that are seen and unseen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next morning doesn't wash away this terrible reality with soothing reassurances that it was all a bad dream. Tommy has to make do nonetheless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Warnings:**  
>  \- minor blood and gore  
> \- description of dead bodies  
> \- implied child death  
> \- mentions of disease and infection  
> \- food mention  
> 

Tommy’s fully lost any way to tell what time it is now that his phone is dead, but it _feels_ like morning. 

That might only be because he’s just woken up, though. For all he knows, it could be halfway through the afternoon. It’s not like he can see the sun’s position. The cold light filtering through the wide storefront windows casts a sluggish, melancholic filter on the whole place, and everything looks a little grey and cold. All subdued down into mellow hues with the back half of the store left steeped in muddy shadow. 

But despite the drabness of it, this maybe-morning still seems promising of a nicer day; it’s brighter, clearer, sky littered with shards of blue where the cloud cover has been chipped away by daylight. It’s still overcast, but shafts of sun do break through every so often, shining down on the street outside and fading in and out alongside the shifting clouds.That means that there’s some semblance of clarity inside the store now; with the pale sunlight washed upon the floor and glinting dully off the racks of eyeglasses, he doesn’t have to fumble and bump past everything like he did last night. 

Tommy takes in the layout of the place as he slips out of the exam room. There’s a reception on the far side of the store, which he knows is a reception because there’s a massive hanging sign labeled ‘Reception’ hanging above the counter. Most of the rest of the store is just taken up by rows upon rows of plastic shelves for various frames and shades of glasses, a good few knocked over. That’s… probably his fault. Whoops. 

Other than that, there’s not much of interest. The floor is made of wood linoleum, the walls are painted a minty green, and plastered to every one of them are cheerful posters advertising free eye tests and two-for-one deals. It takes a moment for his brain to properly adjust through the fog of sleepiness and connect the dots as to why he’s in a Specsavers. 

When it does, his whole situation falls on him like a weighted blanket, but not the nice kind — more of an unwanted mass settled around his shoulders, around his heart, something that threatens to drag him back down to breaking point. It feels like trying to move and then being promptly reminded that you’re chained to a massive steel ball, or like missing a step and your whole perception shifting to make room for the extra half-foot of space you hadn’t taken into account.

He just feels… heavy. Off-balance. A lurching feeling, not a shock but a grim remembering of what his last night’s self left him to deal with.

Anxiety curdles in immediate response and he promptly pushes it back down, closes the lid on that whole part of him that wants to just lie down on the floor and scream until his throat tears itself apart. The stress that remains, he can use to push himself through this. Falling apart won’t solve anything. He has to focus or the fear will consume him, devour him whole, and then what? Nothing will get done. He needs to make something of this.

 _Focus._ Right. 

Tommy blinks and brings his agitated mind’s attention to himself — his _physical_ self, that is, standing in this store, facing but not really looking at the dripping condensation on the windows. Redirection (or something like that): it’s something Wilbur taught him, what feels like a long time ago. To help deal with anxious energy. _Refocus, stabilise, take it one thing at a time._ Wilbur’s always been good with helping him with that kind of stuff. Tommy wishes he —

…

Okay. No more of that, or he’ll just get weird and… sad and shit. _Redirect._

He can feel the floor beneath him, through the soles of his trainers. He can feel the slight cold of the (presumably) morning air on his bare arms. He can feel his shirt, his jeans, the material on his skin. He feels kind of tired, mostly groggy, and still hungry, even though he’s already eaten (a Twix bar and a small plastic pot of grapes that tasted a bit funky). And he feels… nervous. Worried. Lost. But those things don’t matter right now, and they aren’t useful, and Tommy doesn’t want to think about them.

The headache seems to be fading, so that’s nice. His stomach doesn’t feel great, courtesy of eating nothing and then a load of garbage all at once, and also probably those grapes, but there’s really not much he can do about that. In general, he’s kind of wishing he’d had more time to get his stuff from the bathroom before being forcefully vacated because he feels all round pretty gross right now. He could really do with a shower, but he’s not exactly keen on taking the risk of leaving himself vulnerable to any surprise attacks. He’s also not sure where he’d _find_ a shower, bar breaking into some random person’s house. The deodorant will just have to do for now.

When Tommy takes a tentative look outside, the streets are looking a lot less… lethal. There’s a spike of relief; the congestion from last night has cleared from a terrifying mob to just a handful of wandering zombies. If he plays this smart, he can avoid any and all confrontation with the undead, and he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to. He just needs to navigate his way out of the city without dying, and then travel south and survive long enough to find what he’s looking for. Can’t be hard.

A sunspot opens up and wavers on the pavement in front of the store, and a dead woman groans on the opposite side of the street. Tommy looks out at her shambling past as he pulls his bag up unto his shoulders. His legs are stiff beneath him. He revolves the hammer in his hand, readjusts his hold, but no matter what he just can’t seem to find a comfortable grip on it. 

(He’s not sure he can actually look at the hammer right now. His hands shake, bile rises, and he closes his eyes against the stuttering frames of what happened last night.

No time for that.)

Tommy thinks of the city beyond where he is and breathes and tells himself that he’s not scared. That he can handle this. In the end, he doesn’t exactly have any other choice _but_ to.

* * *

Getting out of the commercial zone is the first and biggest step.

He’s learnt his lesson in going into the more populated areas; as it turns out, a higher population density results in streets swarming with corpses, both walking and not, and quadruple the bad smell. It’s too dangerous, and it’s too easy to get overwhelmed. And it’s scary. No fucking chance. 

What Tommy needs to do is distance himself from the city centre — get to the sparser, less crowded streets with the bland office buildings, the narrow apartments and the cheap takeaways. Out of the central commercial zone, that is to say. If he can traverse quickly enough through whatever the rest of this place holds, and get to one of the big roads out, he should be able to avoid any further contact with the undead. All in all, Tommy is really kind of wishing he didn't live in one of the largest cities in the area right about now.

Getting out of the central district proves a lot harder than he’d have liked — there’s still plenty of individual zombies wandering about, and sneaking past them is incredibly stressful. His biggest fear is attracting too much attention and getting mobbed (again). Slipping by the coagulated little groups dotted around the streets becomes a high priority — and he’s doing his best to keep an eye out and be as careful as he can, to avoid making a ruckus and drawing out all the others he just _knows_ are just bumping around hidden in the corners he can’t see. Just waiting to pour out the second he screws up and makes a scene. 

He freezes momentarily — there’s a small cluster ahead. Slowly, unsure, gripped by fear, he steps away… then darts for cover behind a car.

Maybe he jumped the boat just assuming they were zombies. But honestly, watching them through the car door window, he’s not sure what else they _could_ be. They’re all pale and sweaty and bloated, skin blistering, with dark and swollen veins that threaten to pulse right through the paper-thin layer of translucent tissue stretched over them. A lot are injured in some way or another. Stained dark crimson. Mouths flaking dry red. Their movements are stilted, slow; the directionless wandering of a thing that has no ability to conceptualise a plan or goal, any kind of need or want beyond — he assumes — _hunger._

He doesn’t know how a person in _that_ state could still be alive, so they must be zombies. Somehow reanimated corpses, rather than just… really badly diseased. Or — well, it’s usually called a zombie _virus,_ innit? So maybe there was sickness involved, because regular dead people don’t _walk_ — but they’re also definitely _some_ kind of dead, because no matter how sick you are, you don’t keep moving when you’re missing half your insides.

Tommy thinks he may have to settle for just never understanding what these things are. He watches one of them stumble, and its companions follow and begin lumbering down the road towards him. A knot ties itself in his stomach. Just seeing them instills a primal sense of utter fear and revulsion in him, gives him the jitters and the trembly fingers. They shouldn’t spot him, he doesn’t think — he’s out of sight, he’s not making a noise, he’s hidden. They shouldn’t spot him.

… 

Is killing a corpse a crime? Morally wrong?

It _feels_ bad. Really, really, _really_ bad. Awful, actually, in fact, dizzyingly awful and scary and consuming, a hungry guilt, terrible and gnawing and — and — Tommy watches the zombies move right past where he is, then further down the road, and then out of range.

Okay. 

He stands up from his mediocre hiding place and makes his way down the street whilst the coast is clear.

(The hammer shakes with his hands.)

* * *

As he quietly treads through the city, a sense of unease begins to steadily seep through under his skin.

He’s never seen his home like this: deserted, barren, empty. Completely and utterly quiet. There’s no underlying chatter, no buzz of commuters in their cars, no _people._ Even the traffic lights have gone dead. It feels unnatural not to look both ways before crossing the road, but there’s no traffic anymore — no moving traffic, in any case. It’s all frozen, all heading in the same direction out of the city, away from a carnage Tommy can only see the aftermath of. 

It’s creepy. It’s strange. He doesn’t like it.

 _Something terrible happened here._

It’s in the smashed windows and the sideways wreck of a car on the road, the corpse halfway dragged out the door. Smears of blood, sometimes more. The buildings whose doors are left open, and the wreckage inside he can take a glance at as he walks past. It’s all motion, all violence, all a whiplash frenzy that Tommy only got to hear a hint of — he thought he was going to die, in that stupid garage. What was it like out _here?_

It’s all still now, in any case. He could almost believe that everyone else just… snapped out of existence, if it weren’t for — well. The _everything._ He runs his tongue over his teeth, looks through another broken window at the unidentifiable mess inside. The smell spikes. He turns away.

He might well be the only thing of warm flesh and blood left in this entire city.

* * *

What’s worse than the obvious bloodshed and misery is the painstaking _familiarity_ of it all.

Because Tommy knows how to get to the bakery with the really great sausage rolls from here, because he knows the park his parents used to take him as a kid is round the block, because he remembers this particular roundabout from the route his dad took to take him to the orthodontist’s where he got his braces put in, and then later taken out. 

He _recognises_ this street he’s on right now, because it’s the one he takes to go to the barber’s, and over there’s the corner he tripped over when he was thirteen and there’s the curb he scraped his knee up on. Of course he doesn’t know the _whole_ city so intimately, but he still knows a lot of it. It’s still where he lives. Still his home. 

It’s familiar yet unfamiliar, recognisable with a prick of wrongness, warped just enough for him to feel sick the longer he stares at these places that _mean_ something to him, however minutely, but that he can only look at now with a twisting feeling of apprehension and suspicion in his gut. Some sort of tumultuous stew of nostalgia and homesickness for a city that is both his home and as of recently, a mass grave.

That feeling stays with him the whole way through. Past the Victorian redbricks, the multiple churches, the industrial units. Past that one street that has two McDonald’s for some reason. Past the railway station and over the river to the south road out of the city, lined with all the new houses they built with the big signs out front. There’s no barrier, no fence, no anything that would indicate that maybe his previous line of thinking was right, that there’s been another quarantine to keep all this shit in. 

It’s simply a road. He can just walk out of the city.

(It’d been a weak hope, that perhaps he was just unlucky enough to live in the only city that had been struck by a _zombie virus._

God, imagine; he reaches the next town and they’re all fine, and his service provider comes back online, and suddenly he gets an influx of notifications from all his friends who are still alive and fine. It’d make a great story time stream, surviving a zombie outbreak. He could probably spin it to make it more funny and less… traumatising. He’d rake in so many views.

… 

That’s not the case, though. He’s not that lucky.)

The traffic from the initial chaos is even more apparent here — vehicles crammed together in an effort to get out of the city, stuck in a fatal jam, as indicated by the many dead bodies. There really are a lot of those. As well as a good few zombies, though many are trapped under or inside the twisted metal wrecks of cars and campers and the occasional bus. The chaos goes on much the same as far as he can see, as far as the road unwinds through the valley to some distant point. 

God. It really might be the whole world that’s fucked.

It feels a little scary, a little overwhelming to be out of the city, but it’s also a relief; he’s no longer trapped between buildings and cars and roads, he’s not being funneled down one zombie infested street to another. And from here on out, he’s not going into another goddamn city. Ever. Too big, too busy, too easy to get trapped in. Now that he’s out, he can take whatever route he pleases — as long as he’s heading southwards.

Staying on the high road doesn’t feel super secure, not with all this mess littered all over it. He feels too close to just getting grabbed by some unseen assailant, or cornered or impaled on some twisted piece of metal. The last thing he wants is to get horrifically mangled or lose an arm or an eye or something before he’s even gotten ten feet out from city borders.

He also just… doesn’t like seeing all these bodies.

So Tommy deviates — steps off the concrete and into grass and weeds that brush against his calves and flatten under his sole, and begins travelling down the shallow valley.

* * *

The two-lane concretes shrivel down to narrow country roads, towns replaced by villages and then the occasional cluster of houses and stretches of fields, to the point where he legitimately doesn’t recognise his surroundings. Even with his new-found distance from the city, its stench still hasn’t faded from his senses, the memory of rot lining his lungs like rancid tar. It’s like a stubborn stain, a particularly vile one that refuses to come out no matter how hard you scrub or how much bicarb soda you pour on it.

Tommy’s never really been one for the countryside, but he’s barely seen any dead people for miles now that he’s distanced himself from the urban areas, so he supposes it’s not all bad. Quiet, but so was the city. He’s walking along an asphalt road, lined by fencing and a small watery ditch, cradled by low rolling hills and distant copses. His muscles ache. He’s hungry again. He sighs, and takes another pit stop.

Out here, there’s something almost like peace. It’s easier to pretend everything’s fine. That he’s just out on a walk in the countryside. That everyone he knows isn’t dead. That his friends aren’t dead — well, his friends _aren’t_ dead. He’s going to go find them, that’s what he’s doing. His friends aren’t dead.

Tommy’s friends aren’t dead.

… 

He’s got mud all over his shoes and he’s cold and the darkening, thickening cloud cover gives him the nagging suspicion it’s going to start raining any minute now. He’s not… one hundred percent sure where he’s going. South, generally… but that’s a very vague direction. 

It’s difficult, to deal with the reality that he’s just out here in the middle of nowhere, with no directions, with no instructions on where to go or what to do or what to expect. Everything has just been stripped away from him in a calamitous big bang of violence and death, and he’s been tossed into the turmoil and expected to learn how to swim. Whilst being circled by brain-eating sharks. 

He could drown — but he has a lifeline, and that’s Tubbo. Phil and Wilbur, Brighton, _south._ A destination. An end goal. It’s something he knows where to look for. It’s someplace he knows how to get to. (Kind of. He has a long way to go.) In a world where Tommy is grasping for what little sense there is left, this makes more of it than he’s seen since he found out zombies existed in real life.

* * *

The world is dimming.

Darkness like tendrils claws its way closer as the sun melts into the horizon, shadows stretching across the potholed country road and empty fields waning to grey. Distant fence posts and trees blacken to smudged silhouettes, and an evening chill breezes over him. Tommy’s starting to get genuinely worried that he screwed up avoiding the last hamlet he passed, that he’s about to be stranded in the middle of nowhere for the night and chomped on by a zombie he can’t see in the pitch dark.

The shadowy shape of a house appears with perfect timing.

It’s hard to make out detail in the dark, but there’s still a little wavering sunlight left, and as Tommy approaches the building the clearer it gets. It's on its own, bigger than his own home, with walls of old orange brick worn grey in time and weather, and wearing a coat of leafless vines. Its white-glazed windows don’t reveal anything of the inside — they’re completely blacked out. No light at all.

All in all, the house looks very eerie in the dying daylight. Tommy can’t hear anything: no sign of life from its inhabitants, and nothing for miles around. He’s not one for breaking and entering, but it’s dark, and it’s not like he can just sleep outside. He can just dip in and crash for the night, and also maybe find some better food — it’s not that Tommy necessarily wants to _steal_ from anyone either, but he’s honestly getting kind of sick of eating just junk. 

Hammer in hand, he goes up the wide gravel driveway. He treads past a variety of hedging, through the wood doorway porch, till he’s at the front door. He gives it a soft push. It gives way, creaking inwards to reveal a dimly lit hallway behind it. This doesn’t assuage Tommy’s nerves.

“Hello?” His whisper carries down the hall, then vanishes. He doesn’t want to just intrude into someone’s home. Even if it is the end of the world, that’s just bad manners.

No answer comes from the house’s confines, though. He hesitates for a second, two, then takes a step in. The door closes behind him. 

This home is quiet, and cold, and empty. The rank stench of decay clogs the hallway like the air itself is festering. Tommy steps back out (thank god, the door didn’t magically lock itself behind him like out of some sort of tropey horror movie) to gasp in some fresher air, stuffing his lungs with all the sweet oxygen he can get. Honestly, it doesn’t help that much. Even outside the air tastes stale.

When he goes back in and begins exploring the house, he finds that it’s not just the entryway. The entire house smells like a crime scene, an awful pungence sticking to the walls like viscid mucus. It feels like the city all over again. Tommy gags into his palm — _this_ is why he’s been avoiding populated places like the plague. Even this house in the middle of nowhere stinks of death.

He peers into the rooms adjacent to the lobby — what looks like a coatroom to one side, a living room on the other — before heading down the hallway, steps slow and careful, taking a look at the framed pictures on the wall. Looks like a family.

The kitchen is a sad sight. Like the rest of the house, no light, and there are plates of off-smelling food lying on the counter. There’s still dishes in the sink. Tommy can’t help but notice the red plastic dog bowl sitting in the corner. In the cupboards he finds nothing but boxes of tea, some oats, and a near-empty pack of cornflakes (which he tips back and finishes anyways, the vacuum in his gut swallowing them all up and leaving him feeling just as hungry). The fridge holds nothing but stale milk and other inedible shit, empty or spoiled. 

He’s hungry — not hungry enough to start drinking stale milk or eating tea bags, but enough to set his bag on the island of one of the houses and tip out the rest of his sugar stash. The kit-kat bar, the last packs of rainbow belts and the Hubba Bubba feel gross to chew through, sugar sticking like sludge to his gums, but it’s all he has. He sticks his hand into his bag and pulls out the final bag of crisps to finish it off. 

It’s Monster Munch, and he stares at it a second too long before ultimately grabbing a bowl from one of the cupboards to pour the crisps into. He’s fine. He’s just sick of eating trash that bloats his stomach before leaving him hungrier than before.

It’s fully dark out by the time he’s finished his feast, and the utter black he sees out of the windows is enough to keep Tommy inside the house. It’s a pretty nice house, all in all, if a little claustrophobic with its low ceilings and narrow halls. There’s not much room to navigate in the individual rooms themselves, every space taken up by a piece of furniture or another piece of furniture or a delicate pile of books or something else. The clutter and architecture combined with the lack of lighting, Tommy has to take his time to feel his way through the house without tripping up on anything or smacking his head off a wall. His eyes get used to it, eventually, shadows sharpening into recognisable edges and corners he can move around.

When it’s dark in his house, his mum gets annoyed because he never turns the lights on when he’s using the stairs. It’s just because he doesn’t really _need_ to — he knows the layout of his home like the back of his palm, knows how many steps there are and the distance between them, knows where doorways start and end, knows where the counter and the edge of his bed is, knows how to avoid getting gutted by a stray corner. 

This isn’t his house. Tommy makes his way up the stairs, cringing at the creak of hardwood under his feet and swearing at every drop of his stomach he’s graced with when his foot falls too far and he stumbles over a step. The stench gets worse the further upstairs he gets, the stale musk sharpening into something ripe. 

The landing puts him in a stubby hallway that goes both ways, rough carpet replacing the hardwood floors. He turns right. There’s a closed door at the end of it, and as soon as Tommy opens it he’s immediately sent buckling back and gagging. The odor radiating from the room is rotting and vile and now that he thinks about it, likely the source of the smell permeating throughout the entire house. He barely looks up in time to get a good look at the dead person launching themselves at him.

A thud of pain — his back against the wall, he’s knocked back, the weight of this guy barely held back by his fumbling hands. He finds himself with his fingers edging uncomfortably near the dude’s mouth, hooked around his cheekbone and jaw in a desperate bid to hold him away — his arm shakes and strains as he pushes back, not quite strong enough to push the man off — and then he collects enough of his strength to bring the hammer round and smash it face-first into the zombie’s jaw. It’s head snaps to the side, spittle flying, and that pulls enough of the rest of its weight along that Tommy slips out from his cornered position and dashes across the room —

— just in time for him to lurch away from the second zombie.

He flails and falls back onto the drawers — he’s not liking where this is going, trapped with two assholes in a stupid small room. It’s — she’s — the second one is a woman, or was, once, maybe — and she doesn’t — well, _neither_ of them look nearly as bloody as the people in the city, though that doesn’t mean they look _good,_ either, but — shit, okay —

He shoves her into the cranny between the single-person bed and the wall and backs up, shoulders hitched, hammer dreadfully present in his hand. For the first time, his eyes fall to where the inky, bulging veins marbling across these things’ skin coalesce — whatever they have that is too dark to be blood running in rivulets across their entire body, overlapping and clustering on a single, swollen point.

In this woman’s case, it’s her right calf. In the very core of the infected veins sits a throbbing, guilty, bite wound.

The first zombie, recovered, rushes at him and Tommy tears his eyes away from the bite and swings out again with the hammer, and winds up with its claw once again wedged — in the guy’s shoulder this time, not face, but trying to tug it free only pulls him closer, _fuck_ ** _—_** wait —

He actually manages to yank it out and pushes the zombie off of him, fervently twisting around to make a dash for the exit. (He hates the heaviness of the hammer in his hand. He just needs to get to the door.) Suddenly he’s falling — tripped up, and he falls with a slam onto the carpet, which allows him to make direct eyeline with the thing under the bed. 

It’s another one — smaller, a kid, milky-eyed and sallow-skinned, and more importantly with his or her or — _its_ hand grasped around his ankle. And crawling directly for his face.

He jerks his leg out with enough velocity that it actually rips out of that little dead-fingered grip — but it also drags the thing halfway out from under the bed with it. Tommy scrambles away on his hands, heels digging into the carpet, before his back hits the door. The little zombie makes a guttural whine and lashes out at him, and instinctively he gives it a good kick to the face and sends it toppling back. It gives him barely enough time to get to his feet before he’s being rushed again by the other two fuckers.

Tommy bashes the closest one with his hammer before it bites his face off, grappling for the door handle behind him. It’s a strange sort of relief to see that he didn’t kill it, but also, he’s now in a room with three living dead people who keep coming at him, so he hardly has time to dwell on how he feels about murder.

Instead, he gets his shit together and flings the door open and runs through, slamming it closed behind him. He immediately spins around, drops the hammer and latches both hands around the handle and _pulls_ as hard as he can — he feels the several weights on the other side begin to pound against it, wood shaking under their assault.

This goes on for a period of time that Tommy can’t possibly hope to estimate in this frame of mind — might be seconds, might be hours — before tension begins to slip. The zombies are still very much at it, but something occurs to him — and slowly, hesitantly, Tommy lets go of the handle. The zombies keep banging on the door. The handle quakes, even bends a little — but the door doesn’t swing inwards. The zombies just keep _pushing._

An incredulous laugh escapes him as he stares at the shuddering door.

_“Fuckin’ idiots.”_

* * *

He tries his best to check for any strange sounds or spikes in smell before opening any other doors. Luckily, it seems like the rest of the top floor is free of corpses, of any kind.

He finds a small bathroom, which thankfully doesn’t have any dead people hiding behind the shower curtain but _does_ have a pack of Gillettes and a half-empty box of plasters for Tommy to pocket. He makes the most of the other stuff he finds — and it’s gross, but he does brush his teeth and makes sure to rinse his mouth and the stolen toothbrush very thoroughly. He also takes advantage of the comb and rakes it through his hair, tugging at the tangles and the limp curls that have formed from days of not washing. He has to use the window curtain to wipe at the dust on the mirror’s surface, and he pauses at his reflection.

Tommy doesn't look… _fantastic_. Hair still out of place despite the combing attempt, clearly unwashed, his face tired and eyes set in dark hollows. He looks a little like he did when he used to stay up all night in a voice call with Tubbo, working out his channel plan. Just with an ounce more trauma. It feels weird, seeing himself like this. So he stops; looks away from the mirror and walks back out into the hallway.

The master bedroom is by far the largest room he’s found in this house, though that’s not saying much. It’s mostly filled up by the queen-sized bed, with a narrow passage in a U-shape around it. There’s a wardrobe crammed in one corner, though, so you have to either make do and squeeze through the gap between it and the bed, and just deal with the edge of the bedframe digging into your ribs, or hop up and roll over the duvet to get to the other side. 

Tommy closes the door behind him and makes sure to search through the room properly — checking under the bed and in the wardrobe for any surprises, of which there are none, thank god — before setting his bag down on the floor. He looks over the room before his gaze falls on the bed. There are still indentations in the sheets, rumpled covers from whoever slept there last. He feels weird just sleeping on some strangers’ bed, but then again… they’re very dead, as he’s reminded by the ongoing thumping and groaning down the hallway. And the smell, still. They probably won’t mind.

He tugs his shoes off and crawls under the duvet, revelling in the flush of immediate relief as he lies down on the mattress. His muscles ache from walking all day, and finally letting that soreness rest feels borderline euphoric. The sheets are soft and still smell of laundry detergent. Lavender, he thinks.

Everything is very, very still.

There’s no whirr of his computer or sleepy humming through his earbuds, like there has been for the last two or three years. There’s no muffled talking or mumbled conversations from the TV downstairs, like when he was little and still went to bed before his parents. There’s no crickets, like when they used to go to France in the summers when he was really young.

Huh. Tommy probably won’t ever see France again. There’s a strange thought.

It’s not like he’d ever cared much either way about it before; it was just a country his dad had relatives in, and it was always too hot and they drove on the wrong side of the road. And they were fun to make fun off. But now a part of him desperately wants to go back to the last time they went _(god,_ that was years ago) and savour every last minute, soak up the unabashed heat of the sun knowing it’ll be his last time.

And… it’s not just France, is it? It’s everywhere. He’s never leaving the country again — unless he goes way up north to Scotland, but that doesn’t count. It’s still Britain, innit? But he’s never going to Vidcon in America, or — he’s never going to get to meet Techno in person after all. That… stings. That really, really, stings.

(Wilbur won’t get to travel, either. He’ll hate that. He’ll really hate that.)

Tommy stares up at where the ceiling is, though he can’t really see it past the darkness twisting like thick fog above him. He breathes through the stewing misery and pretends than when he breathes out, it takes all of the bad feelings along with it. Everything just kind of sucks right now, and he’s tired and sore and achy, and he wants nothing more than to just drift away and sleep it all off. Or call Tubbo and chat. Or call Wilbur and listen to him practice for his band. Or watch Phil’s late night stream. Or rewatch Techno’s Skyblock videos.

…

Well, the first option’s still viable, at least.

* * *

Tommy can’t _fucking_ sleep.

He can still hear them, can’t _stop_ hearing them — the dead people, bumping against the door down the hallway, their low, grating, miserable groans the only sound Tommy’s been able to hear for the last however many hours. It’s incessant, scrapes on wood and guttural cries that inch through his ears into the cavities of his brain like crawling insects. There’s a pillow wrapped and held over his head, his face is buried into the mattress, his whole body curled under the duvet, but even _then_ they’re. Still. _There._

Rotting, skin sullen and blotchy and crumbling like ash, like dust, eyes milky and hollow and sunken, blank, unseeing, unthinking, blood coagulated inside their bodies like a massive fucking tumurous _clot,_ black and thick like tar, like disease incarnate. Their flesh tears and pulls from itself, peeling like the wet skin of a grape, and the smell is enough to kill. It pulses like a headache, an awful sting that somehow finds its way past all the layers to his sinuses, all rot and decay and putrescence. Through the mouldering heavy lumps of meat they might have once called tongues they still find it in their cadaver of a body to _wail._

Tommy feels like he’s going insane.

The noise and smell is a refusal to let him forget that they’re _there,_ that he’s sleeping in a dead family’s house, in a dead couple’s bed. That the world is fucked and dead and gone. He tosses and turns and glares at the ceiling, eyes long adjusted to the darkness, listening to those things moan down the hallway. They’re dead. They’re _dead._ They used to be people, and now they’re not, and Tommy closes his eyes at the thought. He knows a lot of people. He doesn’t want to think of what’s become of them.

He can’t sleep. He can’t sleep. He can’t sleep. He’s going to fucking claw his brains out. Why can’t they just shut _up!?_

There’s the scurry of rats from somewhere he can’t place. There are dead people down the hallway.

There’s no way of knowing what time it is when he gets out of bed. It’s late enough that tiredness wears down his head, burns his eyes, manifests as an ache in the crook of his neck and shoulders. He fumbles his way to and rifles through the wardrobe, pulls out a scarf, and loops and ties it around his neck in such a way that he can pull it up to cover his nose. It doesn’t do much for the smell.

The darkness swallows him up, inky and apathetic. There is the soft sound of his footfall on the carpet, the scrape of the hammer as he drags it off the nightstand, his bumping against the doorframe, the bend of the door handle and the creak of it opening. He leaves the master bedroom. He faces the door at the end of the hallway. Another muffled thump sounds against it, rattling the handle. One of the zombies groan. 

Tommy raises the hammer, and pushes the door open.

… 

When he heads back to bed a few minutes later, there are still three dead people down the hallway. There is no more noise. In the end, Tommy doesn’t end up sleeping much that night anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Wasteland, Baby! by Hozier

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and make sure to leave a comment!
> 
> Please tell me if there are content warnings specific to this chapter you believe should be added to the beginning notes.
> 
> Title from Wasteland, Baby! by Hozier.  
> 


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